Where do we go from here?

Posted October 14, 2016 by gdemo

Trump is going to lose on November 8, and lose badly. I won’t be surprised if he loses every single state and territory. And while that’s great that we as a nation reject Trump’s bigoted, misogynistic, racist, sexist, rapist ideology, it’s not good that half of our political system is so dysfunctional to have chosen Trump as its leader. It’s not crazy to say that Trump marks the end of the GOP as we’ve known it to function since the 1960s. But where do we go post-GOP?

The Republican party will do what it has been doing for the last decade. They’ll say that the reason Trump got beaten so viciously is because he wasn’t a real conservative. And maybe they’ll even get it together to run a Paul Ryan or a Mitt Romney type of Republican in 2020. And if they do, he or she will be so beaten and battered from the primary that they’ll limp to November with no chance of winning. Or more likely, the party will nominate another Trump and also get summarily executed on election day. Either way, the Republican party can’t compete nationally, which will eventually lead to the party being non-competitive at the state and local levels as well. If they don’t lose Congress this November, it’s only a matter of time before it slips from their fingers as well, and the rest of the party will start circling the drain.

And so imagine a political process in which there really is only one de facto political party and tens of millions of voters are left with no voice. Then what happens? Historically such a scenario leads to an uprising – a rebellion. People want to feel like they have some semblance of power over their government. When they feel like they’ve lost that, bad things happen.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers, but we, as a nation, need to take a step back, widen the lens, pause from obsessing over the latest Trump car crash and think about how we can fix our broken political process, because it is broken.